Adeline Yen Mah

Adeline Yen Mah was born in Tianjin, China, the fifth child of a wealthy businessman and an accountant. Yen Mah’s mother died of a fever two weeks after her birth, due to birthing complications. Because of this, Yen Mah was considered to be bad luck by her family members and she was mistreated by most of her siblings for her entire childhood. A year after his first wife’s death, Yen Mah’s father married a very young half-French, half-Chinese woman and had two more children with her. As described in Chinese Cinderella, Yen Mah’s stepmother despised her stepchildren and was vicious in her mistreatment of them, creating an abusive and fearful home environment. Yen Mah spent much of her childhood in and out of boarding schools, often being moved around due to the Japanese occupation of China and Mao Zedong’s march of Communism across the country, which caused many civilians to flee their homes. Though her father mostly neglected her, Yen Mah was a top student all throughout her childhood. After she won an international playwriting competition, her father decided to send her to England to study medicine, offering her an escape from her dismal childhood and abusive home. Yen Mah left China in 1952 to study at the London Hospital Medical School and, after completing her studies, established her medical practice as an anesthesiologist in California. When Yen Mah’s father died, her stepmother forbade his children to read his will. After her stepmother’s death two years later, Yen Mah discovered that she had been disinherited by her parents. She wrote about the period from her childhood up until discovering that she had been disinherited in her 1997 memoir, Falling Leaves, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller and was translated into over twenty languages. The memoir’s success encouraged Yen Mah to end her medical career and commit herself to being an author. Two years later, Yen Mah published Chinese Cinderella as an abridged version of her memoir, covering only her childhood and aimed at a slightly younger audience. This too was a huge financial success and won a number of literary awards. Yen Mah wrote several more books for children and young adults, as well as a reflection on Chinese traditional philosophy and medicine. She also founded and heads the Falling Leaves Foundation, a cultural institution dedicated to promoting the study of Chinese history and language. Yen Mah has married twice and has two children.